The following projects are involved in PUMA:
We take part in the European research project Nepomuk. The project brings together researchers, industrial software developers, and representative industrial users to develop a comprehensive solution for extending the personal desktop into a collaboration environment which supports both the personal information management and the sharing and exchange across social and organizational relations. This solution is called the Social Semantic Desktop.
Nepomuk intends to realize and deploy a comprehensive solution such as methods, data structures, and a set of tools for extending the personal computer into a collaborative environment, which improves the state-of-the-art in online collaboration and personal data management and augments the intellect of people by providing and organizing information created by single or group efforts.
The TAGora project, a STREP project funded by the European Commission deals with Simulating Emergent Properties in Complex Systems.
The collaborative character underlying many Web 2.0 applications puts them in the spotlight of complex systems science, since the problem of linking the low-level scale of user behavior with the high-level scale of global applicative goals is a typical problem tackled by the science of complexity: understanding how an observed emergent structure arises from the activity and interaction of many globally uncoordinated agents. The large number of users involved, together with the fact that their activity is occurring on the web, provide for the first time a unique opportunity to monitor the "microscopic" behavior of users and link it to the high-level features of applications (for example the global properties of a folksonomy) by using formal tools and concepts from the science of complexity. The TAGora project aims at exploiting these unique opportunities offered by the increasing popularity of computer-mediated social interaction in a variety of contexts.
We won one of the Microsoft Accelerating Search in Academic Research 2006 RFP awards. The objective of this RFP is to support Live Labs' collaboration with the academic research community and is focused on the Internet Search research area. Our project dealt with enhancing link-based search with social search in order to provide enhanced functionality and multiple search paradigms for the Web.
The new generation of the internet ("Web 2.0" or "social internet") is characterized by a very liberal provision of information through the users. Against this background, this DFG project's goal is to explore and to shape the opportunities and risks of the new Web 2.0 technologies in a selected scenario and in close interaction between scientists and lawyers.
After a review of the situation and subsequently the creation of medium-term scenarios, the project will analyze the technical and legal opportunities and risks related to typed roles. Generic concepts will be developed for the design of applications complying with data protection law (identity management, avoidance of personal reference and educational profile, responsibilities). Honouring these concepts, algorithms and procedures for two specific tasks will be developed: Recommender systems for cooperative tagging systems and collaborative spam detection methods for such systems. They are evaluated using real data. The most successful approaches will be implemented in the collaborative publication management system PUMA and will be evaluated in the current operation. Finally, it will be analyzed to which extent, on account of the new complex of problems of Web 2.0, dogmatics and interpretation of data protection law have to be modified, and if possibly legislative activities are necessary or advisable.
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